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Business blogging: the stats

B2B marketers that use blogs receive 67% more leads than those that do not. (Hubspot)

Marketers who have prioritised blogging are 13 times more likely to enjoy positive ROI. (Hubspot)

Companies with 51-100 pages on their website generate 48% more traffic than those with 50 or fewer pages. (Hubspot)

The reason for this blog’s existence…

This blog was the brainchild of Chris Lake. He explains some of the reasons here:

We launched the blog in 2006, after deciding to divert a limited PR budget towards the hiring of full-time writer. We thought that it would be better to create our own content, rather than paying PRs to try to persuade journalists to write about us. PR is tough, and pull beats push, for all sorts of reasons.

The reasoning was that a blog provides a pull for an audience to keep coming back to the site on a regular basis, something which limited PR outreach would not have achieved.

Econsultancy’s brand is built on helping marketers understand and make use of the web, thereby making their jobs easier. For this, we have a range of great reports, training, events and other services.

However, the blog provides a means to tie all of this together. It’s about getting the brand known and providing articles which digital marketers will find useful, which will create informed debate and perhaps inspire people to investigate the site further. We cross-promote our paid content, but not too aggressively.

In that sense, we have been content marketing ever since the blog was launched, even if we and other people haven’t always called it that.

The business case for company blogging

Need to build a business case for you company blog?

Well, here are the many ways that blogging benefits Econsultancy…

SEO

The blog provides regular, unique and quality content, just what Google is looking for.

The key is to research and target keywords and phrases that we want to rank for, and use this information when planning and writing articles.

We don’t just write to tick off a whole bunch of keyword targets. The topics we write about are those we want to rank for, but it makes sense to ensure that the content, headlines and internal link strategy work towards this goal.

To this end, we track the rankings of our target keywords, and ensure that the pages that rank for our keywords point to the relevant parts of the site, or help to ensure higher rankings for our paid content.

If we know which pages rank for the terms we target, we know where to point internal links for maximum effect.

It’s also worth pointing out the value of a hub or ‘hero page’ strategy. While we don’t have hub pages for all of the topics we cover, we do try to link consistently to one or two pages on a given term.

This should produce steadier and more consistent search rankings.

While no business should bank everything on search, it is our biggest acquisition channel, and the blog is a massive part of this.

The SEO benefits the blog has brought means we haven’t had to retain a search agency, and nor have we spent considerable sums of money on paid search every month.

Social media

The content we produce on the blog underpins much of our social activity, and social has been integral to this blog’s growth.

Our social strategy is about more than just broadcasting blog posts, but the regular updates from the blog provide a compelling reason for people to follow us.

Around a quarter to a third of our blog traffic comes in via the likes of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Brand building

This isn’t necessarily easy to measure, but the larger audience that a blog can attract means that the name of Econsultancy is better known that it would otherwise be.

For example, something like three quarters of our total site traffic comes in through the blog.

Indeed, many people probably think that we’re just a blog, and may be less aware of our paid services, but only a small fraction of blog visitors need to buy a report or sign up for an event to make it worthwhile.

In addition, if you search for things like ‘ecommerce checkouts’, ‘SEO best practice’ or ‘digital marketing stats’, you’ll see results for Econsultancy.

This helps to establish the brand name as a source for this information.

Industry authority

The blog has helped to establish Econsultancy as an authority on digital marketing and ecommerce within the industry.

People look to our posts and research for tips and information, while the blog has also provided a platform for other experts in the industry through guest contributions.

Sharing of ideas

Ecommerce and digital marketing is constantly evolving, and there a very few right or wrong answers.

We aim to showcase what constitutes best practice at the time, as well as providing examples and inspiration for readers.

The blog is a great platform for discussion and sharing of ideas. We can think aloud, float ideas, or ask questions and find answers from some pretty smart digital marketers.

Tone of voice

This is another thing that is hard to measure, but I think it has been very important to us.

The blog and our social channels allow us to show a more casual tone of voice, and help to set us apart from more ‘stuffy’ competitors.

We know our stuff, and are endlessly fascinated by ecommerce and digital marketing, but it isn’t necessary to smother your content in buzzwords and pseudo-academic writing.